‘Boris Johnson, the party is over’, says Helen Morgan after her North Shropshire win
The Liberal Democrats have defeated the Conservatives to win the North Shropshire by-election with a 5,925 majority, just two years after the Tories won the seat with a 23,000 majority
Helen Morgan – who came third with just 10 per cent of the vote in the same seat in the 2019 general election – won with 17,957 votes, while her Tory rival Neil Shastri-Hurst’s scored 12,032. It means the area will not have a blue MP for the first time in more than a century.
The contest was triggered after former MP Owen Paterson resigned having been found to have breached lobbying rules. Mr Paterson had held the seat for 24 years until he quit on 5 November, following a botched attempt by Boris Johnson to shield him from a 30-day suspension.
Mr Johnson will no doubt be looking on at the result with some concern, just days after his authority was challenged when almost 100 Tory rebels voted against measures in his newly-enacted Covid ‘plan B’. Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, said this morning’s result represented a “clear message to the PM that [his] party is over”.
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